This investigation explored relationships between format of text (electronic or print-based) and reading comprehension of adolescent readers. Also in question were potential influences on comprehension from related measures including academic placement of participants, gender, prior knowledge of the content, and overall reading ability. Influences…

This qualitative study analyzed preservice teachers' literacy memories. Each literate person has a history of becoming literate. As university students who plan to be future teachers think about their own literate histories, they begin to construct their own beliefs about learning to read and the teaching of reading and writing. These beliefs may…

Using a sample of 282 Norwegian upper secondary students, we examined whether two dimensions of topic-specific epistemic beliefs, concerning the certainty of knowledge and the justification for knowing, predicted students' understanding of seven texts representing partly conflicting views on climate change. Text comprehension was measured at three…

This paper presents a study of 88 British 10-12-year-old children's knowledge of text message (SMS) abbreviations ("textisms") and how it relates to their school literacy attainment. As a measure of textism knowledge, the children were asked to compose text messages they might write if they were in each of a set of scenarios. Their text…

When the author became a professor with interests in literature, composition, technical communication, speech, and rhetoric, he little anticipated the extent to which book collecting could affect research and teaching, but his finds increasingly enlightened him. As he gravitated toward composition, technical communication, speech, and rhetoric in…

This paper reports the effects of the properties of source texts on summarization. One hundred and fifty-seven undergraduates were asked to write summaries of one of three extended English texts of similar length and readability, but differing in other discoursal features such as lexical diversity and macro-organization. The effects of…

Although wired classrooms are now commonplace, the online tools available to teachers and students are changing more rapidly than ever. However, not all online tools are alike. With the proliferation of the World Wide Web and the advent of Web 2.0, which unlike Web 1.0 enables collaboration and manipulation of online texts, teachers must…

In this article, the author explores how a group of ten fourth-grade students who were avid readers became a community of inquiry. The primary goal of this study was to document the children's reading engagement: how they created, entered, and sustained the world of the story. This article also reflects the impact of three elements--data…

Teachers encounter immense variety in literary competence among students in their secondary school classrooms. Yet, little is known about how they perceive and deal with this variety. Moreover, little is known about the literary development that students undergo during their school career and the different levels of development that can be…

The focus of this dissertation is the highly specialized and stylized liturgical language of Russian Church Slavonic (RCS). Historically, RCS has been strictly controlled by authorities and has conformed to established norms, but innovations have nevertheless arisen in response to various conditions. One major wave of innovations was a long,…

In this article, the author talks about "Developing Early Literacy," the report of the National Early Literacy Panel. The panel, which consisted of nine experts, was convened by the National Institute for Literacy to synthesize the research on the development of literacy from birth through age 5. Over the eight years of their work, only 190…

This article assumes that literacy practices are social practices. Based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 2005) this view of literacy provides an understanding that the ways a person reads and writes change, depending on that person's identity, the type of texts that are involved and the context in which those texts and identities are located.…

In Experiment 1, monolingual native Spanish speakers (NSSs) had better kernel recall and longer end-of-clause (EOC) pauses than native English speakers (NESs) when reading texts that varied in syntactic complexity as a function of the number of nonessential clauses added to the kernel text. NSS familiarity with embedded clauses in Spanish seem to…

This study assessed the utility of document prevalence and familiarity as predictors of adult document literacy performance. Three indexes--quantifying document prevalence, document familiarity, and the frequency of document use--were constructed using survey responses from an adult community sample and documents collected from government agencies…

Teachers frequently read aloud as a part of writing instruction so that children's book authors can serve as mentors for students' writing. Despite extensive anecdotal reporting of the significance of reading aloud children's literature within writing workshop, the intertextual connections students construct between interactive read alouds and…